I made most of it up as I went.

I went out on my own with no guidance and not much business experience. I started in a single room, one day a week. That part worked.

Then I opened a second location half an hour across town, on a two-year lease, because I assumed two locations meant more clients. I was also renting rooms in two GP clinics on completely different terms. It was a mess, and it was expensive.

I spent thousands on courses and coaching trying to fix it. Most of it was vague, and none of it was built for someone at my stage.

I worked it out eventually. Built a practice with staff, ran it for years, and then left it to build something else. I’ve spent the last two years on HealthMate, a healthtech company.

That’s meant a lot of conversations with practitioners, and I keep hearing my own mistakes handed back to me. Same wrong turns, same expensive lessons, same good clinicians burning out on the way to something they could have reached far more easily. It’s the part I can’t leave alone.

Here’s what I’d want someone to have told me back then: you don’t have to resign to start, you don’t have to guess at the order, and the mistakes I paid to learn are all avoidable.

That’s what this is.